FEATURE-It's not just the economy: Why football and sharks can affect elections

* Beyond campaigns, many factors determine how people vote

* For some, knowing the issues is too much of a hassle

* Presidents held accountable for things they can't control

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 On the Saturday before the
Nov. 6 election, President Barack Obama might want to root for
Ohio State University's football team when it takes on his
home-state University of Illinois. A win by the Buckeyes could
boost his chances of carrying Ohio, a crucial battleground
state.

Obama can take heart that Florida beachgoers haven't
suffered from a spate of shark attacks this year, which could
have hurt his prospects there. On the other hand, the brutal
drought that has gripped much of the Midwest could make it
tougher for the president to win Iowa.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked Americans to base
their votes on whether they were better off than they had been
four years earlier - a mantra repeated this year by Obama's
rival, Republican Mitt Romney.

But a growing body of research indicates that many Americans
vote based on how they're feeling on that particular day - and
that if they're happy, it can be good news for incumbents.
Voters' feelings can hinge on factors beyond the control of any
politician, from the weather to the play of local sports teams.

Voters typically know how the economy has performed over the
past six months, but not the past four years, researchers say.
Many aren't aware of major political developments, let alone
candidates' policy views. The daily twists and turns of the
campaign have little impact.

"You might imagine there's an ideal world in some peoples'
heads where everyone votes on policy and knows what the
candidates and parties stand for," said Gabriel Lenz, a
political science professor at the University of California,
Berkeley. "I think we're pretty sure we're not in that world."

Surveys have shown for decades that a significant number of
voters know little about politics. This year appears to be no
exception.

Nearly half of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in
July didn't know that Republican Mitt Romney favors more
restrictions on abortion than Obama.

Only 40 percent knew that Republicans control the House of
Representatives - a crucial piece of information needed to
assess the Democratic president's tenure and the partisan
gridlock that has plagued Washington.

Voters with strong partisan affiliations tend to know more
about politics. But they also are more likely to retain
inaccurate information if it reinforces their views.

For example, nearly one-third of Republicans polled by
YouGov last January said they believed Obama was born abroad -
and therefore ineligible to be president, as conspiracy
theorists claim - even though Obama had released a long-form
birth certificate showing that he was born in the United States.

IGNORANT BY CHOICE

Ignorance makes sense for some voters when it comes to
politics, said George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin.

The act of voting is relatively easy, but it takes a lot
more effort to gather the amount of information needed to
determine which candidate reflects a voter's own policy views.
Because any single vote is extremely unlikely to tip the outcome
of an election, many voters believe it does not make sense for
them to invest a lot of time in following a campaign, he said.

With limited time and interest, voters often rely on
shortcuts to settle on a candidate, whether party affiliation or
a sense that a candidate shares a voter's values.

A candidate's policy positions tend not to matter much - in
fact, voters are more likely to shift their own policy views if
they don't line up with their chosen candidate than they are to
vote for someone else, Lenz said.

Many others appear to treat elections as a referendum on the
performance of the incumbent.

Romney hopes voters will punish Obama for the nation's high
unemployment rates and sluggish economic growth the president
has presided over since taking office in January 2009.

But most voters have a hard time thinking back that far. So
they tend to look at the six months to a year before the
election as a proxy for the incumbent's term, according to
research by Larry Bartels, a political science professor at
Vanderbilt University.

When incumbents have presided over robust election-year
growth, as in 1964 (Lyndon Johnson) and 1984 (Reagan), they have
been re-elected handily. In years when growth has been less
robust, the results typically have been closer.

This short-term focus has had real consequences.

Republican candidates Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Richard
Nixon in 1968 and George W. Bush all owed their victories to the
fact that voters either forgot or ignored strong periods of
income growth early in the terms of their Democratic
predecessors, Bartels writes in "Unequal Democracy: The
Political Economy of the New Gilded Age."

This time around, the pattern might help Obama, who has
presided over periods in 2009 and 2011 when personal income
actually shrank. Based on this year's
mediocre-but-still-positive growth in personal income and gross
domestic product, many forecasters expect Obama to defeat Romney
next month - a scenario that current opinion polls reflect.

"The die is cast, I'd say," said George Washington
University political scientist John Sides.

'THE FOOTBALL STUFF, IT'S ALARMING'

Voters seem to hold presidents accountable for events over
which they had no control.

One group of researchers found that incumbent presidents,
senators and governors got an average boost of 1.6 percentage
points if the local college football team won shortly before
election day.

The increased sense of well-being that a victory fostered
among fans made them more likely to stick with an incumbent
rather than vote for a challenger, the researchers found.

The effect was more dramatic in areas where the local team
had a large following. That could have implications in states
such as Ohio, Florida and Michigan, which are home to successful
college football programs and are likely to play a key role in
determining who wins the presidency.

"The football stuff, it's alarming," said Loyola Marymount
University economics professor Andrew Healy, one of the study's
authors. "It's good to know how voters actually think."

JAWS EFFECT

A 2004 study by Bartels and Christopher Achen of Princeton
University found that voters punished incumbent President
Woodrow Wilson for a spate of 1916 shark attacks in New Jersey.

In the election that year, Wilson's share of the vote in the
beach towns that suffered a decline in tourism after the attacks
dropped by 8 percentage points from his total in the 1912
election. His vote total in nearby inland towns that were not
affected by the shark attacks showed no difference from 1912.

"Shark attacks are natural disasters in the purest sense of
the term, and they have no governmental solution. Yet the voters
punished (Wilson) anyway," Bartels and Achen wrote.

Bartels and Achen also found that voters punish incumbent
politicians for bad weather. Examining rainfall data back to
1896, they found that extreme droughts or floods cost office
holders an average of 1.5 percentage points.

Lousy weather, even more than confusing ballots in Florida,
may have cost Democratic Vice President Al Gore the White House
in the 2000 election, Bartels and Achen wrote. They said that
severe drought and excessive rainfall probably cost Gore
victories in seven states, from Arizona to New Hampshire.

Bartels and Achen said their research indicated that voters
are less rational than experts had previously thought.

"Democracies take their electoral direction from human
beings with fewer capacities for self-government than either
writer imagined," they wrote.

News media could help voters by putting developments in the
economy or politics in the context of a president's four years
in office, said political scientists who have studied the issue.

Politicians could avoid pandering to voters' fears by, for
example, pointing out that trade with China allows U.S.
consumers to save money on a wide range of goods.

Voters could help fix the problem as well, said George Mason
University economist Bryan Caplan.

Dec 9 Coca-Cola Co said on Friday that
Muhtar Kent would step aside as chief executive next year and be
replaced by James Quincey, a company veteran credited with
several recent changes to help the company cut its dependence on
sugary drinks.

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